It’s a Battlefield Read Online Free PDF Page B

‘What’s the use of a dozen names? One must live. It’s different with you.’ She told him gently how different. He was a chief clerk, indispensable to the office; they couldn’t just go out into the streets and get another chief clerk. ‘Anyone can do my job. But you,’ she considered the dark coat, the stiff collar, the old-young face, with pride and contempt, as much as to say, it’s not everyone who could be like you, and it’s not everyone who’d want to be, ‘you’ve got brains.’
    They flattened themselves against the shop to let the factory girls go by, and behind them the second-hand coats, the dingy blouses shook with the shopkeeper’s approach. Conrad Drover said grudgingly. ‘It’s lucky someone’s got the brains.’ She could not have told from his voice how he longed that it might be someone else. Brains had only meant that he must work harder in the elementary school and suffer more at the secondary school than those born free of them. At night he could still hear the malicious chorus telling him that he was a favourite of the masters, mocking him for the pretentious name that his parents had fastened on him, like a badge of brains since birth. Brains, like a fierce heat, had turned the world to a desert round him, and across the sands in the occasional mirage he saw the stupid crowds, playing, laughing, and without thought enjoying the tenderness, the compassion, the companionship of love.
    â€˜Now tell me: do you want to buy a coat or a blouse or a pair of trousers? Fine plus-four suit for twenty-five shillings. You don’t need to go to Savile Row to do your shopping.’ The avenue of clothes still quivered behind him.
    â€˜No, no,’ Conrad Drover said. ‘I don’t want anything.’
    â€˜Well then, tell me: do you think it’s fair blocking up my shop talking to your girl? I’ve got to make a living, haven’t I? Well now, tell me . . .’
    â€˜Come away,’ Kay said, but he stood hesitating while he wondered whether the dealer was right, it wasn’t fair; he ought to buy a tie or a pair of socks, something cheap which he could afford.
    â€˜Oh, no. You wait a moment and tell me . . .’
    â€˜Shut your mouth,’ Kay Rimmer said, taking Conrad by the arm and drawing him a little way down the street.
    *
    Sacrifice, Mr Surrogate thought, as he stared from the window of his bare and tasteful room into the wide blue pool of the Bloomsbury square. The plane trees spread pale palms in the lamplight, and the postman went knocking from door to door. Sacrifice. Mr Surrogate strode to the door and back again to the window, pausing for a moment at the mirror over the Adam mantel to catch himself warily unaware, plump and fair, his hair grey over the ears, his mouth a little too resolute. But he corrected that, self-conscious for a moment when he caught the insolent Tartar eyes of Lenin in the plaster bust. Comrades, one man must die for the people. We accept Comrade Drover’s sacrifice, knowing, knowing – back to the window, a turn on the heel, and again the bourgeois face with its insolent stare.
    There was a knock on the door. It was cautiously opened and a hand slipped a letter through on to the sideboard. ‘Thank you, Davis, thank you.’
    â€˜It’s gone seven, sir.’
    â€˜Thank you, Davis, I am quite aware of the time.’ Comrades, Mr Surrogate began again. Comrades, we must not be daunted; no sacrifice is too great. . . . He stopped again and regarded nervously the involved beautiful unintelligible handwriting. He opened the envelope reluctantly and deciphered with difficulty the invitation to dinner which lay, like a bare white egg, in an intricate oriental nest of lettering. Caroline is curious about Drover, he thought. He never gave the surface value to an invitation. At the heart of his elaborate conceit lay an extravagant